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How can I remove trailing whitespace from file extensions and folders in snow leopard ?

Ideally I would be able to run a single command within a directory that would search and remove for all files and folders with trailing whitespace and their subfolders.

I couldn't seem to do this with automator.

It's a delicate operation I don't want to make mistakes with.

Help much appreciated.

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1 Answer

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#!/bin/bash

IFS=$'\n'
find ~/Desktop -mindepth 1 -depth | while read f; do
    new="$(dirname "$f")/$(basename "$f" | sed 's/ *$//')"
    [[ "$f" != "$new" ]] && mv "$f" "$new"
done
  • Without IFS=$'\n', the f variables read by | while read f wouldn't have leading or trailing spaces
  • Changing sed 's/ *$//' to sed 's/^ *//;s/ *$// would remove spaces from the start as well
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Thank you for the feedback. Now that you mention it I would certainly like to remove the leading whitespace too. I'm a bit confused how the script would look in that case. Do mean remove $'\n' and | while read to achieve this ? – timoto Mar 21 '12 at 15:51
's/^ *//;s/ *$//' would also remove spaces at the start. I meant that without IFS=$'\n' none of the f variables read by while read f would have trailing or leading spaces. – Lauri Ranta Mar 22 '12 at 7:03
If I enter the original on one line in Terminal I get: syntax error near unexpected token `do' and if run in a script i get command not found. – timoto Mar 22 '12 at 12:57
@timoto Was the single line version missing a semicolon after the IFS=$'\n' or something? The command not found error could be caused by trying to run the script like script.sh instead of ./script.sh if it wasn't in your path. – Lauri Ranta Mar 22 '12 at 13:10
Yes I'm running the script as sudo ./script.sh I also tried this on the cl IFS=$'\n'; for d in {1..9}; do find ~/test -name '* ' -depth $d | while read f; do mv "$f" "$(sed 's/ *$//' <<< "$f")" done done there was no error, but it just hung and did not return to the prompt. – timoto Mar 22 '12 at 14:01
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